Crowstep
11d ago
Can you give examples of these institutions and how they censored information?
Because every developed country (and most undeveloped ones) used COVID vaccines and demonstrated their effectiveness. Is the entire planet in on this conspiracy?
Crowstep
11d ago
Holocaust denial censorship is best understood as part and parcel of bans on Nazi symbols. Holocaust deniers aren't disinterested historians searching for truth. They're Jew-haters who are threatened by the idea of a genocide of Jews because it undermines their beliefs that Jews rule the world.
Fortunately, I live in a country which bans neither Holocaust denial (our vibrant Muslim underclass are very grateful) nor Nazi symbolism. The Holocaust deniers have failed to win in the free marketplace of ideas because they are wrong (and motivated by transparent ethnic animosity), not because the government won't let them post on the internet.
Crowstep
11d ago
I have literally personally spoken to a Holocaust survivor who was in a death camp as a girl. I believe her (and the entirety of the historical field) over internet jew-haters.
Crowstep
11d ago
I'm not sure what you're saying. Are you suggesting that I need to personally know doctors, scientists and scientifically literate people to believe that vaccines work?
Crowstep
11d ago
Contracting and then passing on COVID to my older immuno-suppressed relatives, for whom the vaccine doesn't provide 100% protection. And since the way we ultimately defeated the virus was by achieving herd immunity, me getting a vaccine contributes to that, rather than free-riding as anti-vaxxers did.
Crowstep
12d ago
Who are 'the pro-vaccine people', every government and health authority in the developed world? The supermajority of people on the planet who willingly got a vaccine? Humanity is not in a manichean struggle between pro- and anti-vax. Vaccines are just a (very) useful medical technology that unfortunately got tied up with the toxic partisanship and negative polarisation of American politics.
In the less angry parts of the world, we just got our jabs and got on with life once the virus went away because of them.
It's pretty fallacious to split the entire species into 'the pro-vaccine side' and 'the anti-vaccine side' and conclude that because some people or organisations were censoring information (as if this is a new thing for organisations to do) then you can ignore all studies and evidence (and your own lying eyes) about whether the covid vaccines worked.
Germany censors people who think the Holocaust didn't happen. That doesn't mean the Holocaust deniers are right.
Paul Graham says to keep your identity small, and this is a perfect example why. You're wilfully putting yourself at risk for a disease because your political partisanship won't allow you to accept a medical technology that your political opponents might like.
Crowstep
12d ago
we don't have a counterfactual Earth to compare against
No, but we have a counterfactual population to compare against, the population who chose not to get vaccinated. The comparison is gigantic and unambiguous, vaccines saved lives. And that's with the unvaccinated population benefitting from the partial herd immunity provided by the vaccinated population.
the distinct impression I got from the public medical establishment during the pandemic is that if it were happening they would not have been honest about it because of how they took a mortage on their reputations to push the vaccines
If they weren't being honest about side effects, why did you quote an article about them describing side effects and how common they are as a reason for not getting the vaccine? How does that not count as honesty?
There was no scientific curiosity
If that were true, they would have just released the vaccines instead of spending months and months doing exhaustive trials to see whether and to what extent the vaccines reduced infection, and what side effects there were. If scientific curiosity means anything, it means testing your hypotheses with studies. What exactly did you expect them to do beyond that?
but I have no data either way that I would personally trust about this
You have a massive population of vaccinated people, living among a massive population of unvaccinated people. The unvaccinated population had death rates from COVID that an order of magnitude higher than the vaccinated population. What more evidence could you ask for?
Crowstep
12d ago
So you're avoiding a vaccine which stopped a global pandemic that killed millions because four out of every million (that is, 0.0004%) people who get the vaccine develop a heart condition because of it?
It feels like your position is based more on political contrarianism than statistical sense.
Like, I get it, governments got authoritarian and petty when it came to vaccines. I couldn't buy a beer in a German biergarten because I didn't have the right vaccine passport app, while all my friends (who I was sitting with) were allowed to, as if the beer somehow facilitated the transmission of the virus. That was dumb. But you're not sticking it to the wokes by not getting a vaccine, you're just increasing the chance that you get ill or (God forbid) die from a preventable disease.
Crowstep
13d ago
Your post suggests that you're talking about yourself rather than your child, which is a relief. But I have to ask, what negatives do you forsee from getting vaccinated so much that you'd risk getting the diseases they protect against?
Crowstep
15d ago
Surely, such a gigantic supermajority must reflect the will of the voters.
I'm sure you're aware, but Labour only got a third of the vote. Their supermajority of seats is an artefact of a bad electoral system, not a mandate from the people. And I'm pretty sure making nine-month abortions legal wasn't in the manifesto.
We don't need to speculate about what the public thinks about this amendment. We know what they think because they (at least the female half) have been asked directly. Only 3% of British women think abortion up to the point of birth should be legal.
Crowstep
20d ago
I predict more Israel Bad posts everywhere
I'm not sure it'll make a big difference. Months of civilians getting starved, displaced and blown up is quite different from a short, narrowly focused military operation targetting high-ranking members of a regime plus military/nuclear hardware. Israel's actions against Hezbollah didn't elicit much of a negative reaction.
Crowstep
20d ago
The American identity survives regardless of who makes up our population
I wouldn't call the country splitting into two halves who hate eachother 'surviving'.
Meanwhile Germany, in spite of the political changes you mention is the most politically stable country in the world (I didn't go looking for a list with Germany at the top I swear, I googled 'least partisan countries' and that's what came up).
Germany's form of government may have changed, but it doesn't matter because it has a core ethnic group whose similarity transcends political organisation. Meanwhile in the multiracial proposition nation, everyone hates eachother and can't agree on anything.
Crowstep
28d ago
I can't give a definitive answer to your question (which I guess you're not really expecting). It's far too personal, and reasons you've given are valid to consider.
Louise Perry likens pregnancy and giving birth as the female equivalent of going to war. It's dangerous, intoxicating, glorious, painful and rewarding all at once. It's brings you close to death and closer to life. You're going through something that all of your female ancestors went through and coming out the other side having created a new soul.
If you do go ahead and have another baby, you'll be doing something heroic. That's all I can really say.
Crowstep
28d ago
I always found this weird, as mathematically for every lonely man there has to be one lonely woman and vice versa
I assume when people are talking about male loneliness they mean a lack of friends, not necessarily a lack of romantic engagement. Nobody thinks of the widowed church lady who spends all day drinking tea with her friends and looking after her grandchildren as lonely.
Crowstep
29d ago
Isn't Ozempic-face just an effect of rapid weight loss, rather than something specific to the GLP-1 agonists?
Seems like the solution there is just to take a lower dose and lose the weight less quickly. Maybe take collagen supplements.
Crowstep
29d ago
One statement I've found that cuts across the bipartisan spectrum is 'the internet made us all crazy'. Conservatives will imagine liberal craziness, liberals will imagine conservative craziness, but everyone I've said it to agrees. Something broke in the 2010s. It was probably the smartphones, the internet was safer when it was anchored to a desktop that you had to walk away from to do anything else. Now we spend most of our waking hours plugged into the outrage machine.
Who exactly is 'they' here?
The survivors, the soldiers who liberated the camps and the historians who studied the Holocaust afterwards are not the ones doing the censoring. Governments (and not most governments) censor Holocaust denial because they know that the only people who question the historical facts do so because they hate Jews, and hating Jews caused the Nazis to kill six million of them. We can argue whether censorship is the right approach or not, but its mere existence isn't evidence that the Holocaust was exaggerated or made up. To believe otherwise fails in the same way that all true conspiracy theories fail, it requires too much coordination from too many people over too long.
More options
Context Copy link